In part one we outlined a way in which service providers can tender for jobs by offering prognostic bids. For instance real estate agents or realtors already do this to some extent when they look around your house, tell you how much they love it and what a great price they’ll get for you. The only problem is that their bids suffer from the Mandy Rice Davies problem. When giving evidence in a trial and asked about Lord Astor’s denials ...

When we hosted our World Cup comp we had a problem. There were only a few datapoints, so it wasn’t easy to rule out luck. And given the low level of scoring in soccer, there are more upsets there than in some other sports. So we got people to offer probabilistic bids. A competitor might luck out on a game where he rated a team a 51% chance of winning – but he’d really have blotted his copybook if he ...

Here at Kaggle we don’t just want to unleash the wisdom of crowds on existing competitions, we want to bring you in to help us develop our site. We’ll be rolling out a range of competitions over the rest of this year, but we’re sure there are interesting data sources that we’re unaware of. And we're sure there are potential competition hosts who are unaware of Kaggle or the power of what can be done here. So if you can ...